


First Days

by the_wordbutler



Series: Motion Practice [28]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Cable and Deadpool, Marvel (Comics), Spider-Man (Comicverse), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, First Day of School, Legal Drama, Multi, motion practice universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-15
Updated: 2014-08-15
Packaged: 2018-02-13 08:17:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2143632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_wordbutler/pseuds/the_wordbutler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In August, the kids head back to school. </p><p>Not all their parents respond the same—or well.</p>
            </blockquote>





	First Days

**Author's Note:**

> This story takes place in August 2013, during the time gap between Chapters 15 and 16 of [Diversions](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1036030) and before [Chain of Custody](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1553414). 
> 
> Thanks as always to my betas, Jen and saranoh, who don't mind working on a time table.

“Ready for kisses?” Bucky asks, and out of the corner of his eye, he watches Steve bristle. 

Today, dressed in her favorite polka-dot dress and bright pink sneakers, Dot is officially a kindergartener. Her backpack, hair bows, and jelly bracelets (her choice) match the sneakers, but her lunchbox involves a variety of neon-colored flowers. Basically, she is her father’s daughter, and Bucky holds back his grin as she smoothes her hands over her dress one last time.

“Do I look pretty?” she asks.

“You look wonderful,” Steve answers immediately. He crouches in front of her and sweeps a few stray curls out of her face. She’s started talking about chopping off her hair— _like Natasha_ , she says seriously—and Bucky dies a little inside every single time, even if the curly ends are a bitch to comb through. Steve never complains about that, though, just like he never complains about her fashion sense or the way she denies needing the bathroom until the potty dance hits critical mass.

“Listen,” Steve says after a moment, his big palm against her tiny cheek. “We’re proud of you. You know that, right? You’re our little girl—”

“I’m _five_ ,” Dot interrupts, and her stubborn jaw almost cracks Bucky up. “I’m not little.”

Steve chuckles. “You’re right, baby, you’re not. You’re a big girl, now.” He runs his thumb down her nose, and she giggles and starts to wriggle away. “Be smart and brave today, okay?”

“And good,” Bucky chimes in. Dot tips her head up, still beaming, and his heart clenches a couple degrees. “Smart, brave, and good.”

“Like you and Daddy,” Dot recites, because they’ve repeated it a dozen-plus times over the last two weeks.

He grins. “Exactly,” he replies, and bends down to kiss her on the forehead.

She kisses Steve on the cheek, clinging around his neck for a few quick seconds before she releases him and runs over to the line of kindergarteners. One of the girls from her dance class is already in line, and they collide into a hug. Bucky laughs for a second, but when he glances over at Steve, his husband’s standing stock still.

“Hey,” he says quietly. 

Steve jerks his head away from the line of kindergarteners. He rubs a quick hand over his face, but Bucky’s no idiot kid—he notices the tears clinging to his lower eyelids, the shakiness of his breath. When he loops an arm around Steve’s waist, Steve basically falls into him.

“She’s our baby, Buck,” Steve murmurs, his voice sticky and rough. “Our baby’s going to kindergarten, and we’ll—”

“Do this again with the next one.” Steve jerks his head to glance over, and Bucky— He swallows, but he smiles, too. “Unless you ruled that out when I wasn’t looking.”

“Never,” Steve says, almost like he’s praying or something, and Bucky leans against his shoulder as they wait for their kid to walk into her first day of kindergarten.

 

==

 

“Wait, where’s Bruce?”

The whole morning’s felt like surviving a hurricane, if hurricanes are hormonal thirteen-year-olds with weirdly exacting specifications as to what jeans are appropriate with what oversized t-shirts. Tony knows that it’s a side effect of that first-day-back-at-school blues—kid wants to fit in, and who can blame him for that?—but dear god, there is literally not enough coffee in the _world_ to fuel Tony through this particular experience.

Of course, part of that’s probably his fault, what with how he and Bruce spent the hour between two and three a.m., but that’s really neither here nor there.

“Uh, in the house?” Tony asks.

Miles scowls and tosses his backpack into the front seat of the Audi. Grumpily, too, like somebody just hurricane-rained on his parade. “Hey,” Tony calls out to him, and his kid rolls his eyes without glancing up. “You know the deal: if I’m in town, I take you to school and your dad brings you home. Keeps everybody sane, frees up the shower, you name it.”

“I know.”

“Right, so then why—” And there’s an end to that sentence, Tony swears there is, but then his son raises his head with this kicked-puppy expression and Tony’s heart crawls into his throat. He’s had close to a year to fall in love with this kid, to shove him up on a pedestal and declare to the world _hey, this kid right here, he’s ours, you can’t have him_ —but he forgets sometimes that Miles hasn’t lived in his head for that year. He’s never _lived_ Tony’s terminal-velocity love affair with him, or his pride, or his devotion.

And he’s never lived Bruce’s, either.

“Go get in the Prius,” Tony tells him. Miles fish-faces at him, and he waves a hand. “Your dad’s probably standing in the bedroom, moping that he can’t take your picture or something weirdly parent-sentimental like that. Get in the Prius, I’ll drag him down with us.”

“Has he even taken a shower?” Miles wonders.

“Do you plan on smelling him?” Tony retorts, and the last thing he hears as he dashes back inside is his kid’s laughter.

And that’s how he and Bruce end up standing in the Castle Rock Middle School parking lot a half-hour later, their asses planted against the side of the Prius as their kid bounds up the concrete steps. 

“Did you do this for me or for Miles?” Bruce asks out of nowhere, and Tony blinks for a second as he glances over. The guy’s just about half-dressed, his shirt wrinkled and his hair puffy as it air-dries in the August humidity, and Tony almost drowns in just how _gorgeous_ he is. He’s also watching Tony, his eyes narrowed. “You weren’t looking for a change in routine on the first day of school, so there’s clearly a reason you invited me along.”

“Road head?” Tony suggests. Bruce’s eyelids flutter like he’s _really_ working not to pull a face, so Tony cards his fingers into his still-damp hair and kisses his temple. He smells like shampoo and soap and sun, and Tony closes his eyes. “First ‘first day of school’ as parents,” he replies from there, close to Bruce’s ear. “Might as well share the load.”

“Please don’t turn _that_ into a sex joke, too,” Bruce deadpans, and he finally grins—a real grin, not a _bravely sending my thirteen-year-old to seventh grade_ grin—when Tony busts up laughing.

 

==

 

As far as Nick’s concerned, there’s exactly one rule in their household:

Melinda stays the hell away from the kids on their first day of school.

He’s not sure where the hell it started, ‘cause he clearly remembers them sending the boys off to kindergarten together, two soldiers in a war of hyperactive five-year-olds who muddied their school uniforms on the first damn day. But somewhere around third or fourth grade, Nick figured out that the only way his kids had any prayer of surviving to adulthood was if Mel kissed them goodbye and left _long_ before the chaos started.

And trust him on this: it’s always fucking chaos.

Like today, for instance, the boys’ first day of sixth grade (in the same building as the fifth grade, thank god) and Beth’s first day of third. ‘Cause although Alex is sitting downstairs at the kitchen table and sorting through his damn school supplies for the eight hundredth time (you forget a packet of highlighters _once_ and scar a kid for life), his siblings are still upstairs.

Two minutes before they need to be out the door.

He checks his watch one last time before he storms over to the stairs. Half because he’s fed up, yeah, and half because the stomping’s usually enough to spark a little hustle in them. “I swear to god,” he starts to call, “if you’re not _both_ down here in thirty seconds, I—”

“Sorry, sorry!” Jackson announces. He half-runs, half-falls down the stairs, his polo shirt hanging out of his shorts and his shoes tucked under his arms. He straightens up his spine when he catches Nick’s eye, which helps Nick’s mood a little. “Beth’s freaking out about socks,” he reports.

“Socks?”

“Yeah, she wants some with sparkles, I don’t even know.”

He shakes his head for a second before he trots off to the kitchen, and Nick releases a sigh. He tries hard not to yell at Beth—really, not to yell at _any_ of them, but Beth’s the one who likes to burst into _Daddy doesn’t love me_ tears when she’s being punished—but at the same time, they’re about to be late on the first day of school. He drags a hand over his face. “Elizabeth Alice, if you don’t h—”

“I just want my sparkle socks!” 

“You’re not even allowed to wear sparkle socks!” Nick hollers back up at her. Congratulations, universe, this is now his life: shouting about socks at 7:44 in the fucking morning. “It’s white, blue, or bl—”

“They’re blue with sparkles!” Beth shouts back.

“Sparkles are not part of your dress code!” In the kitchen, the boys snicker—at least, ‘til Nick glances over his shoulder to glare at them. “You have ‘til the count of three to get down here, or I’m calling your mom and _she_ can deal with you.”

“But—”

“One,” Nick says, and suddenly, there’s Beth, careening down the stairs in flash of navy blue jumper and frizzy hair. She’s in the kitchen and shoving her feet into her shoes before Nick can even turn around.

He smirks a little to himself, but he also makes sure the grin’s gone the second he twists around. “Car,” he commands, and they’re out of the house in record time.

An hour later, Melinda e-mails him. _We still have three children?_

He snorts. _Barely_ , he reports, but he attaches their hasty first-day-of-school picture, too.

 

==

 

“You didn’t have to come,” Nate says for what is about the umpteen billionth time in the last fifteen minutes, and since he says it in that _I am worried that you feel obligated and beholden_ tone Wade hates to the very depths of his actual soul, Wade rolls his fucking eyes.

It’s like— Here’s the thing about relationships that Wade’s learned in the time between April and August: the dust settles eventually. It settles, and instead of fucking on every surface and talking about stuff that’s not important, you fuck on a few of your favorite surfaces and talk about stuff that _is_. Like your failed marriage or your cancer or your adorable kid or your shitty parents, whatever floats your man-of-war on a given day. Wade _loves_ this part of being a boyfriend. He loves it like he loves breathing and Mexican food and kung-fu movies, because it’s real. You know? Everything’s tangible when you’re discussing your scars—physical or metaphysical, whatever—at two in the morning after a marathon sex-fest.

But Nate acts like every little bit of baggage he offloads is maybe that one bag too many, and because of that, Wade sometimes wants to knock him in his sexy head.

“I sometimes want to knock you in your sexy head,” he says, and Nate blinks at him in that way he saves for when he’s not _totally_ sure yet whether he’s amused or annoyed. Wade jabs a finger into his arm. “You said this is your tradition with Hope, right? Dinner after the first day of school, every year, accept no imitations, whatever-whatever.” 

Nate hesitates, and Wade cocks an eyebrow. When his man-mountain sex-pistol boyfriend stays silent, he waves a hand. Nate sighs. “Yes, dear,” he says like a long-suffering spouse.

God, Wade’s so stupidly in love with this asshole, it’s not even funny. 

But he’s in the middle of a point, too, so sappy sentimentality needs to wait. “Right, okay,” he continues. “So here’s the million dollar follow-up question I’ve got for you, Nathan ‘Secretly Insecure’ Summers: if her step-dad on Nadine’s side wants to do the whole ‘hugs and kisses on the way to school’ bullshit, then why wouldn’t I want to do the whole ‘hugs and kisses after school’ part?”

He’s proud of himself for a second, what with the way Nate looks shocked and thoughtful all at once, but then Nate’s mouth twists like he’s about a half-second away from a killer smile. Wade trusts that expression about as far as he can throw it, and since an expression’s not a tangible thing you can actually heave across a room (or the parking lot of the local school for the deaf), then—

“You’re comparing yourself to Brett?” Nate finally asks, his eyes all twinkly and warm.

“Only in the sense that we’re both the guys with Hope’s parents and both care about her like a d—”

Wade’s not sure that your brain’s supposed to fizzle when it catches up to your mouth. That actually sounds like some kind of disorder, now that he thinks about it—or tries to think about it, since everything in his head is hissing a little and his heart’s trying to jump out of his chest and his mouth feels dry and—

He’s about to pull out his phone and google stroke symptoms when Hope’s suddenly _there_ , tackle-hugging her dad like he might evaporate. Nate lifts her up to hug her back, harder and stronger than maybe a nine-year-old kid needs to be hugged, but from the way she clings on, Wade’s pretty sure she’s okay with that.

He salutes at her—a joke from before he started in on his signing classes, which are a shitton of work but also a shitton of fun—and she—

Look, he’s not Hope’s step-dad or anything. You know that, right? He’s the guy who happens to sleep with her dad a hell of a lot.

But he catches her when she leans over to hug him, his face in her red hair and her grip so warm and welcome and all the things he _missed_ about her in the last couple weeks.

And when they’ve released her, he forms the signs he’s practiced literally all week: «Happy first day of school.»

**Author's Note:**

> A new MPU posting schedule, including with some news on an upcoming story, can be found [here](http://the-wordbutler.tumblr.com/post/94860826547/obviously-there-is-good-news-in-this-post-and).


End file.
